Recently, Facebook made changes to Fan pages which affect the way that people, brands, public figures, topics, etc. are connected as it relates to pages on Facebook. With these changes comes the introduction of Community pages and new restrictions set forth on what are now ‘Official Pages’.

(Yes, I know I wasn’t sure in my last post on the subject of ‘Official Pages’ however it’s now… well… ‘Official’)

What used to be ‘Fan Pages’ have now become ‘Official Pages’ or ‘Community pages’. ‘Official Pages’ are now restricted to being created by authorized representatives of an entity, while ‘Community Pages’ now have more of a ‘Community’ feel (and are controlled by Facebook).

Both types of pages have changed the ‘become a fan’ language to simply ‘like’. Facebook states that this particular change offers a more ‘light-weight’ way for people to connect with entities.

According to Facebook:

“Only the official representative of an organization, business, celebrity, or band may create a Facebook Page. The Page creator can then add other representatives to help them manage the Page. Each Page admin will be able to update and edit their Pages from their own accounts.”

Community pages on the other hand are designed to allow people to connect and discuss topics, experiences and causes. These new Community Pages will beconnected with Wikipedia under the creative commons license and will display logo and profile information based on the Wikipedia article for that community’s topic. Facebook will also be displaying related posts in real time on Community Pages.

So what is the difference?

According to Facebook:

“Community Pages are built around topics, causes or experiences. Official Pages are maintained by authorized representatives of a business, brand, celebrity, or organization, and they can create and share content about the entities that they represent. Community Pages, on the other hand, won’t generate stories in your News Feed, and won’t be maintained by a single author.”

What this means to you..

You can still create an ‘Official Page’ for your business or brand, however if you would like to create a generic page to discuss ‘all things real estate’ or ‘all things foreclosure’, then you would do best to start a community page on the subject. When people like your business or brand, they simply click ‘like’ to connect with you and/or your business/brand. People can ‘like’ up to 500 pages and that comes out of their 5,000 connection total for people and entities combined.

What’s my takeaway on this change?

I personally like the change.

For one, the change of the terminology ‘become a fan’ to ‘like’ offers a more ‘non-committal’ way for people to connect with your business. To me, ‘become a fan’ seems more of a commitment than someone simply clicking ‘like’. I think this gives businesses more of a reach in the long run. People are making the same connection to your business, but to the consumer it is less of a commitment to ‘like’ something than it is to become an all-out fan.

Also in my opinion, what the ‘Official’ and ‘Community’ page change does is clean up the mess.

For example, this eliminates the annoying… “Become a fan of”…

‘Can this page get more fans than [fill in the blank]’

‘How many [fill in the blank] does it take to [fill in the blank]‘

‘I hate my [enter brand here] cell phone because_____’

‘Farmville fanatics fan page #99,999,999′

‘Mafia Wars fanatics fan page #99,999,999’

You get the picture. Pretty much, now you will either have to have a company, brand, or be a public figure in order to set up a page. If you really feel compelled to talk about Mafia wars or Farmville, you can visit the one (1) community page designated for that topic.

What do you think about the change?

Cheryl Waller
Marketing Consultant SEO, SEM, SMM
www.CherylWaller.com

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This Friday April 30th it's Giants vs Rockies at San Francisco and we're throwing our first ever official baseball tweetup together with the Giants at AT&T Park. Lots of us from Twitter HQ are going to walk over to the stadium to meet before the game and we would love for you to join us! Tickets for the tweetup plus the game are less expensive than the regular game tickets, and $2 from each ticket purchased will be donated to one of our local partners, Room to Read.

Malaria threatens one half of the world's population, resulting in 350 million cases each year and nearly one million deaths on an annual basis—many of them children. World Malaria day is this Sunday, and the impact of organizations devoted to the cause has already begun. In partnership with Malaria No More and The Case Foundation, Twitter is offering a way to help put an end to this disease. You can help starting today with just one tweet.

A worker in Tanzania inspects mosquito nets before delivery.

When you send a tweet about Malaria and pledge your donation of $10, you are providing a life-saving bed net to protect against this mosquito-borne infections disease. Your generous donation will be matched by The Case Foundation, providing the opportunity to double the impact of each tweet. For more information about Twitter and the fight against Malaria, visit our Hope140 site dedicated to helping all of us become a force for good.

This post was requested by AR member Melissa Zavala. In her comment on my blog post Facebook: Profiles, Fan Pages, and Groups… Oh My!

She asks “…Can you write a blog post about how to embed youtube video into a fan page? I know how to insert it into an fb personal page, but cannot figure out how to add it to a fan page…”

No problem Melissa!

With Facebook custom business pages you are most likely going to be using the static FBML app. If you are not sure how to add or use it, just check out the videoHow to Create Your Own Facebook Custom Fan Page

In order to add YouTube, Facebook or swf videos to your custom fan page, you are going to have to get a little bit ‘techy’. It’s actually pretty simple, but if you have never even worked with HTML, then FBML may be a bit intimidating. Fear not though because I am going to make this as simple as possible for you.

When you are editing your custom business page using the static FBML application you will see an empty box.

In that box you will need to paste your CSS, HTML and FBML. Let’s say for the sake of argument right now that we want to just add a youtube video with a headline, a subheading, and a little anchor text below the video linking to our website. What we are going to need first is a little HTML to get this started.

Let’s start with the headline. I am just going to be using the H1 tag here because there are a lot of HTML tags that will not work with the static FBML application. Most of them include font color, sizes and positioning. All of that NEEDS to be controlled with CSS, but that is beyond the scope of this post.

<h1>This is My Awesome Headline</h1>

That will give you a nice large, bold headline that will be left aligned. Now lets add a break so that the subheading starts on the next line and add our subheading.

<h1>This is My Awesome Headline</h1><br >

<h2>This is My Cool Subheading</h2>

Ok great, now we have both our headline and subheading. Let’s get to the fun part. Adding the video in FBML. Now I will let you know here that there are different versions of FBML, but as long as you are using the most current FBML version, then you do not need to specify FBML with tags. <FBML></FBML>

For our video we are going to be using <fb:swf>. Now there are many variables and controls that we can add here, but we are going to keep this nice and simple.

<h1>This is My Awesome Headline</h1><br >

<h2>This is My Cool Subheading</h2><br>

<fb:swf

swfbgcolor=”000000″

imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;”

swfsrc=’http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxxxxxx’

imgsrc=’http://img.youtube.com/vi/xxxxxxxxxx/1.jpg’

width=’340′ height=’270′ />

Ok cool now all we have to do is get our video ID from youtube and replace the xxxxxxx above for both. Don’t change anything else unless you are certain that you know what you are doing.

Ok now we are going to add another break and some anchor text underneath the video that leads to our website.

<h1>This is My Awesome Headline</h1><br >

<h2>This is My Cool Subheading</h2><br>

<fb:swf

swfbgcolor=”000000″

imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;”

swfsrc=’http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxxxxxx’

imgsrc=’http://img.youtube.com/vi/xxxxxxxxxx/1.jpg’

width=’340′ height=’270′ /><br>

Please visit <a href=http://www.MyCoolWebsite.com>My Cool Website</a><br>

Copy and paste all of your code into the FMBL box, choose the title of your tab and that’s it. You have successfully added a heading, subheading, video and anchor text to your custom business fan page. When you are done it should look like this:

Have another request for a tutorial? Leave a comment and let me know.

If you like what you read here, please ‘Like’ Custom Fan Pages so I can send you updates when new tutorials come out.

Cheryl Waller
Marketing Consultant SEO, SEM, SMM
www.CherylWaller.com

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Maybe you are new to Facebook and maybe you are not, but maybe you still wonder whether you should add a Fan page, start a group or even bother with any of it at all. I mean what’s the difference anyway? Right?

Actually… Quite a bit.

Let’s start with personal profiles

First and foremost; if you are currently using your personal profile to promote your business by using a business name and/or logo on your personal profile…. STOP! Personal profiles are for individuals, not businesses. Not only is it against Facebook terms of service, it also detracts from the whole idea of being ‘social’. Guys, really? It’s not called ‘Logobook’ or ‘Brandbook’. Personal profiles need to have a picture of you. No and ifs or buts… use your college photo if you want, that’s fine…

Your personal profile is the first profile you set up on Facebook. (In very rare instances there is a business management account, but I will not go into that with this post)With your personal profile you post an image of yourself, post information about you and share pics, links, information etc with other friends in your network. Personal profiles are only allowed up to 5,000 friends and pages combined.  So that means if you are a fan of 100 pages, your friend limit is 4,900. Become a fan  (now this has been changed to ‘like’ a page) of 200 pages and your friend limit is 4,800. You get the idea. Basically, you can only have ‘connections’ to 5,000 people, entities or brands COMBINED on a personal profile.

Why would you want 5,000 friends? Ok, this is where the lines get a little burred between business and personal. You can also get your account deleted by Facebook if you go about it the wrong way or try to do it too quickly. Having 5,000 friends in the same industry as you is a quite powerful business tool. I won’t get much into it in this post, but start seeking out 10-20 people inside and outside your industry each day and send a friend request with an introduction. Try to make as many professional connections as you can. Believe me 5,000 people that play Farmville is NOT going to help you in the long run.

That’s about as far as I am going with personal profiles for this post. Right now, if you are currently using a business logo, brand, trademark or emblem on your personal page, I highly suggest you jump over to FaceBook right now to upload a personal  photo and make sure that you are using your real name and not your business name …then come back to read the rest of this post.

See Also How to Avoid Being Scammed on Facebook | Verifying Applications

Fan Pages

Fan pages are for real businesses, brands, artists or public figures and essentially are their own identity. You must be an official representative of that entity in order to create a page.  Once a page is created it essentially IS its own person. Pages cannot be publically tracked back to the creator of the page or the admins unless you choose to reveal that on your page. Pages allow you to update fans by demographic, which is really useful for target marketing. Fans can interact with your brand and have discussions, leave reviews, watch videos etc. etc.

Using an application called static FBML, you can add a custom tab to your fan page which is essentially a mini-website within Facebook. You can create your own custom fan page or have a custom fan page professional designed and uploaded for you. You can then set the default landing page for new fans to be sent directly to your custom Facebook business page. Current fans will always be taken directly to your fan page wall.

Also see Video: How to Create Your Own Facebook Custom Fan Page

And How to Add Your ActiveRain Blog to Your Facebook Fan Page in 10 Mins

There is no limit to the amount of fans you can have for a fan page and you can mass update all of your fans via email and on your fans walls via the fan page wall. Fan page updates are also integrated into Google real-time search results, whereas personal profile wall updates are not. Fan page content is publically visible (and searchable by search engines) regardless of a visitor’s status as a fan. (This is controllable using FBML, however that is beyond the scope of this post)

Groups

Groups are different from fan pages in a couple of ways. While they also have no limit to the number of members within the group, you will not be able to email update the members of your group once its size reaches 5,000 members. Groups also give you control over membership to the group. With a fan page, fans just click to become a fan and that’s it. Presto. They are a fan of your page. With groups, you can control who can become a member. You can choose to make it a private group, open to the public or limited to a certain network of people. If you choose you can also require an admin of the group to approve each group member before they are allowed access to the group. You can change these settings at any time and also choose to block specific people from joining at all. The only setting that cannot be changed is a network-specific group. Once a group is network specific, it cannot become global.

Membership types in a group

Members of a group can see content of that group based on the privacy settings set by the admins of the group. The number of groups a person joins does not affect their friend/pages limit but each person is limited to joining 300 groups in total. Group officers are listed on the group’s page and are essentially the same as any other member, besides being listed as an officer. Only group admins can make changes, send updates, set privacy or appoint other admins to the group.

So there you have it. There is a quick overview of the difference between personal profiles, fan pages, and groups. Keep your personal profile personal, your fans (potential clients and customers) updated and your members (current customers and clients) connected to your business through the use of these powerful business tools!

Cheryl Waller
Marketing Consultant SEO, SEM, SMM
www.CherylWaller.com

Like my post? Take a sec and ‘Like’ my pages 

Social Networking for Real Estate Agents

CUSTOM ‘FAN’ PAGES

BUSINESS PAGE TEMPLATES

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Last month we previewed an incredibly simple set of web tools which enable partner websites to easily integrate Twitter functionality into their site experience called @anywhere. The idea is that web users will be able to engage with existing Twitter features from all of their favorite sites. Today, we're happy to announce this service is live and ready for anyone who wants to build a little Twitter into their online experience.

Our friends at Foursquare call @anywhere "aggressively simple." Other partners like Amazon are excited that customers can "conveniently follow suggested Twitter accounts without ever leaving" the shopping experience. Bing implements the new tools so users can "seamlessly interact with Twitter." HuffPo already went all-out and built a Twitter edition and the WSJ.com told us, they hope @anywhere "will help us connect readers with the broader story."

Citysearch says that @anywhere "will help our users get a complete real-time snapshot of a merchant and, when they'd like, engage that merchant via Twitter directly from our site. And, in the UK, The Guardian is using @anywhere to innovatively connect readers with those running for public office: "Now, from within our pages you can ask questions your prospective parliamentary candidates and of our journalists. This is a clear indication of how we're trying to lower barriers between our audience and those who hold power or seek to hold office, and between our readers and our journalists."

The full list of sites who have been working on @anywhere implementations pre-public launch include AdAge, Amazon, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, Disqus, eBay, Foursquare, Gawker, Google, Gowalla, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Hunch, Mashable, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, WSJ.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

We'll soon be highlighting their integrations here and at media.twitter.com. Let's see what you can do with @anywhere. We can't wait.